It’s T minus 10 days until we open the garden at Scarecrow Cottage to raise money for NGS Nursing Charities and preparations are not going well. Thanks to the long wet spring there has been a surfeit of greedy slugs, grown fat and slithery on plants that took too long to go from young, tender and tasty to mature, tough and pest proof. Last week should have seen us devoting daylight hours to tidying and weeding but that didn’t happen either. Let me get my excuse out of the way first. After four years of dodging the Covid bullet I knew my time was up when a flushed and feverish looking man sat opposite me on the crowded train from Carmarthen. By Ferryside I was doomed and decided to distract myself from his (and soon to be mine) racking cough by texting Annie to say that I was on the way home and social distancing would be appropriate. She didn’t answer which could only mean one of two things – a lost phone or a migraine.
A Lost Phone
A few years ago Cal intended to sell her beach front flat in Aberavon so she and Annie were spending a whole Sunday cleaning it. At about 2pm it was decided that a tea break was in order so Annie offered to go and get a pint of milk. Cal wondered if Annie needed directions to the shop but Annie was indignant and reminded Cal that she had been born and brought up just a couple of streets away. She knew the way to the shops like the back of her hand, thank you very much and Cal would do well to put the kettle on and get the biscuits out because Annie would be back within 5 minutes. As indeed she would have been if she’d turned left when she came out of the building but the Aberavon of Annie’s youth meant that the shop she remembered was a) lost in the fog of fifty years ago and b) now a Turkish Barber’s – special rate for OAPs on Wednesdays, no appointment necessary.
The Harrisons
Fifteen wandering minutes later and Annie stopped an elderly couple who were about to get in their car. She explained the dilemma of the lost shop and they tutted in sympathy. They too found it increasingly difficult to find shops where they had left them. Perhaps they could give Annie a lift to the garage at the end of the road? There was sure to be milk there. Annie, forgetting every lesson ever learnt about getting into cars with strangers told the potential psychopaths that she was grateful for their kindness, slid into the back seat, secured her seat belt and waited for Mr Harrison to introduce himself and his wife, explain how they had moved to Baglan a while back to be closer to their daughter and her children, although what with everyone having lives of their own they didn’t see them that much and sometimes wondered if they should have stayed in the valleys where they’d spent 50 golden years of marriage. The garage was a lot further down the road than anyone had realised and as Annie waved goodbye to the speeding off Harrisons, she thought it would be a good idea to ring Cal and explain what had happened to the 5 minute jaunt to the shops. She put her hand in the pocket of her jacket which was her favoured phone resting place. Empty. Annie patted all the other pockets about her person. Empty. After several identical searches presented the same result she recalled the slight thud she had heard as she had got into Mr Harrison’s car. It was past 3pm by the time Annie got back to the flat and another 3 days before Annie had persuaded her phone company to download all of her old data to a new phone. For the next month Annie tried ringing her old phone every few hours and none of us will ever know whether Mr and Mrs Harrison realised that Tom Jones belting out the chorus to Sex Bomb from the back seat of the car was neither a sporadic auditory hallucination nor a call to action for Year 51.
Gardening Leave
Are you wondering what this has to do with us being behind schedule? Well, it turns out that Annie hadn’t answered the phone because she had the migraine from Hell induced by failing to read the bit on the back of the Woodworm treatment tin which advised painting furniture outdoors so that fumes were not inhaled. Meanwhile I was indeed overtaken by Covid so we were both on gardening leave for a week.
I’m also blaming the Covid for one more thing. In the midst of my fever I made the mistake of posting information about our open garden on social media and tagging the chums who often attend our events. Obviously my phrasing wasn’t as succinct as usual because as my temperature returned to normal and I got back to real life, I could see that 5 of the social media post recipients hadn’t just liked the post but had then reposted it to bring it to the attention of all of their followers. That means we might now have another 24,353 people arriving for tea and cakes on the lawn.
We’re going to need a bigger garden.